If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905-1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust...

"Pollack shares with poignant humor and candid language the trials of being smart and female in a world that is just learning to imagine equality between the sexes. ['Is it me?'] is a question all smart women have asked themselves. Pollack's autobiographical essays take us on a roller-coaster ride from gratifyingly humorous street-level stories of innocent curiosity to the calculated meanness of tweeny girls to the defensive strategies of threatened...